Six long years later (already!).. Cardinal Brennan closed... and memories fading..

I took this photo today as I drove by my long gone high school..

With another cold winter ending, the rebirth of spring beginning, Cardinal Brennan sits there vacant.. On a hill in Fountain Springs, PA..

My alma mater now has simply become a relic.. A closed down school in the distance. Memories are fading.. Lives moved on. But what secrets, I often ponder, does that cold building still hold?

Do bells still ring, and do poets still sing? Does an echo survive of time gone? And does that elevator still work? Or.. did it ever?

It’s been 6 years since Cardinal Brennan began the process of shutting down.. That’s six graduating classes that never finished there and two that never even started.. Lives have been altered. But what did we benefit? Nothing.. But all adjusted to the new reality..

Last century, when times seemed simpler and I was a high school student, I went to this building.. Now it’s empty and desolate.. It’s simply a aging piece of brick and mortar. Rumor has it that it will soon be a complex of apartments, perhaps.. a residential area.. Not a school. Something else. Something wrong...Something it was never intended on being.

As for now, there is no classroom of children... no Lisa Ling from Channel One news in the morning.. no Frau.. nuns, priests, or mass.. no field day.. no spirit day.. Nothing. But I suspect, in the stillness of the night, the building’s spirits and past somehow lives. At least I’d like to believe that..